Friday, December 23, 2011

William Blake: Visionary Poet, Painter

William Blake (1757-1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver of the Romantic era who illustrated and printed his own books.

His father was a successful London hosier who encouraged Blake's artistic talents. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by his mother. In 1767 he was sent to drawing school, and at the age of 14 apprenticed with an engraver for seven years. Blake has recorded that from his early years, he experienced visions of angels and ghostly monks and that he saw and conversed with them.

Blake engraved and published most of his major works himself. In the "Prophetic Books", Blake expressed his lifelong concern with the struggle of the soul to free its natural energies from reason and organized religion. Among Blake's later artistic works are drawings and engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy and the 21 illustrations to the book of Job, which was completed when he was almost 70 years old.

- He who binds to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity's sunrise.

-If a thing loves, it is infinite.

-Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

-The most sublime act is to set another before you.

-To See a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild Flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.

-What is now proved was once only imagined.

-If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.